Multi-Horizon Forecasting for Limit Order Books: Novel Deep Learning Approaches and Hardware Acceleration using Intelligent Processing Units

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Multi-Horizon Forecasting for Limit Order Books: Novel Deep Learning Approaches and Hardware Acceleration using Intelligent Processing Units

Zihao Zhang
Stefan Zohren
Published on 5/21/2021
Equities
Machine learning
Deep learning
High frequency trading

This paper introduces multi-horizon forecasting models for limit order book (LOB) data using deep learning, specifically sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) and attention mechanisms. Unlike standard single-step prediction, the proposed encoder-decoder architectures generate a forecasting path over multiple horizons. The encoder is based on DeepLOB, a state-of-the-art network combining CNNs, Inception modules, and LSTM, while the decoder uses either Seq2Seq or attention to produce multi-step outputs. Experiments on the FI-2010 benchmark and a large LSE dataset (169M samples) show that the models achieve competitive performance at short horizons and significantly outperform at long horizons (e.g., k=100) due to the autoregressive structure that feeds short-term predictions into future estimates. Attention weights reveal that recent LOB observations are most important, explaining why Seq2Seq does not suffer from long input sequences. The paper also addresses the computational bottleneck of recurrent encoder-decoder models by leveraging Graphcore's Intelligent Processing Units (IPUs). Benchmarks show IPUs reduce training time to about 15% of GPU time, offering a practical solution for large-scale LOB data. Transfer learning experiments further demonstrate the models' robustness, as they generalize well to unseen stocks, suggesting universal features in high-frequency LOB data.

Highlights

  • 1Proposes multi-horizon forecasting models for limit order book data using Seq2Seq and Attention mechanisms, enabling a single network to predict multiple future steps.
  • 2Achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art at short horizons and superior performance at long horizons (e.g., k=100) due to autoregressive structure.
  • 3Demonstrates that Intelligent Processing Units (IPUs) significantly accelerate training of encoder-decoder models, reducing training time to about 15% of GPU time.
  • 4Validates models on both the FI-2010 benchmark and a large LSE dataset (169M samples), showing robustness and transfer learning capability across stocks.

Methods

  • M
    Encoder-decoder architecture with DeepLOB as encoder (CNNs, Inception Module, LSTM) and Seq2Seq or Attention as decoder for multi-step forecasting.
  • M
    Attention mechanism with dot, general, and concatenate scoring functions to selectively weight encoder hidden states.
  • M
    Hardware acceleration using Graphcore's Intelligent Processing Units (IPUs) with Poplar software, compared against NVIDIA GPUs.

Results

  • R
    On FI-2010, DeepLOB-Attention achieves F1 scores of 82.37% (k=10), 73.73% (k=20), 76.94% (k=30), 79.38% (k=50), and 81.49% (k=100), outperforming DeepLOB at k=100.
  • R
    On LSE dataset, DeepLOB-Attention achieves F1 scores of 68.09% (k=20), 65.63% (k=50), and 62.46% (k=100), with superior performance at longer horizons.
  • R
    Transfer learning results show DeepLOB-Attention achieves F1 of 65.35% (k=20), 62.70% (k=50), and 59.75% (k=100) on 20 unseen stocks.
  • R
    IPU training is approximately 6-7x faster than GPU for encoder-decoder models, reducing per-epoch time from ~120s to ~18s.
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